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Thursday, August 16, 6:30 p.m.

Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA

A nationally renowned artist and University of Iowa professor praised by the Washington Post for her “refreshingly experimental bent,” Laurel Farrin presents an August 16 Artist Talk at the Figge Art Museum, offering insight into the collection of abstract, geometric, and frequently humorous images on display in her latest exhibition No Partiuclar Order.

Splitting her time between Iowa City and New York City, Farrin mixes elements of hard-edge painting with references to pop culture in her paintings, drawings, and videos. By pulling inspiration and techniques from various sources, Farrin explores how viewers relate to abstract forms. Farrin’s paintings confound the viewer with visual riddles, contradictions, and comic juxtapositions, all the while convincing the viewer to feel sympathy for abstract shapes.

Laurel Farrin is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa. She received a BFA from Ohio University-Athens and an MFA from the University of Maryland, and has oftentimes served as an artist-in-residence: at the Roswell Museum and Art Center in Roswell, New Mexico; at New York's Millay Colony for the Arts; and at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Farrin also received an individual artist grant from the Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities.

According to Farrin's Artist Statement at LaurelFarrin.com: “We act as antennas sensing the world, absorbing ever-shifting experiences with the weight and substance of a human body’s gravitational presence. How do we glean information and make meaning? Familiar becomes unfamiliar; humorous becomes pathetic. I hitch painting to a two-way process – the reception, construction, and transformation of images into abstractions, and abstractions transformed into images. The process is embodied in paint and other substances that impose resistances, obstructions, turns, flows. I pay attention to how these shifts redirect me to new possibilities. My body and the materials wrestle and collaborate to reconfigure something into another thing that is unpredictable and surprising – sometimes awkwardly funny but also present and true to material and self. The process is a flow of static trying to dial into a clear signal and vice versa.”

Admission to Farrin's August 16 Artist Talk at 6:30 p.m. is free, and more information on the presentation, her No Particular Order exhibit, and other museum events and exhibitions is available by calling (563)326-7804 or visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.

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